Given up to reveries... Archana Ramaswamy (Titania) in a recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Are modern theatre-makers like myself just "mucking about" with Shakespeare? In this week's TLS Eric Griffiths means to compliment when he suggests that one of the Bard's strengths is his "weak readiness to let himself be mucked about with before he comes back up smiling" but he's also patronising directors and theatre companies who dare to tamper with Shakespeare's texts, making them sound like kids messing around with something they don't fully understand.
He kindly allows that "it's good for people to get what they can from Shakespeare", implying that experimental approaches to Shakespeare's plays are akin to self-serving therapy sessions, then suggests that a production using only extracts from the text "throws into relief what['s] left out, so we can reassure ourselves, as Prospero tells Miranda after the supposed wreck in The Tempest, there's no harm done".
The idea of a production doing "harm" to Shakespeare is laughable (as I suspect Griffiths would concede, judging from his otherwise intelligent review). Shakespeare certainly didn't suffer from Kneehigh Theatre's recent retelling of Cymbeline for the RSC's Complete Works' season. A company celebrated for devised work, their rewritten version captured the spirit of his crazy, glorious, shambolic play, which Kneehigh artistic director Emma Rice describes as "a play that breaks the rules". It couldn't have been more different from Rachel Kavanaugh's textually faithful, equally magical production of Cymbeline at the Open Air Theatre. I say textually faithful but the very length of the play (and its sheer oddness - "re-enter Guiderius with Cloton's head" and "Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning" aren't your average stage directions) meant that Kavanaugh likewise had to fillet the text. I can't think of a director that doesn't.
Shakespeare's texts always need work before they can be staged. Some of them are frankly a mess - muddled by textual corruption, disputed collaborations, time-obscured meanings of words (and jokes). Others are vast amalgamations that are only staged in full if fullness is the point of the exercise. A director facing Shakespeare has two immediate practical considerations: which version to use and what to cut.
More importantly, however, the director of Shakespeare is taking on the wild ranging of an extraordinary imagination. Shakespeare didn't just break rules, he smashed them. And in staging his plays, theatre-makers must strive to live up to his ambition. This means taking risks, and risks, of course, can lead to horrible messes. But we need to fail in order to succeed. It's inescapable that every staging of a Shakespeare text is a new version of that play. So by all means set Macbeth in a kitchen or Coriolanus in Japan. Turn Henry V into a lyrical lament for the victims of Aids or a comment on the Iraq war. Dress Hamlet in doublet and hose or hoodie and jeans. Do what you need to do to show us why your version of this play at this time in this theatre is important. Fall flat on your face. Get up again. Just don't patronise your audience.
I have a good deal of sympathy with Griffiths' complaint about "the smothering tyranny of relevance". Desperate attempts to bring Shakespeare up to date can be limiting and condescending, and leave theatregoers bemoaning ill-conceived anachronistic combinations of swords and revolvers. But what a flawed attempt to make Shakespeare relevant can never do is "harm". Irritate, perhaps, but as Griffiths himself puts it, Shakespeare does always come up smiling.
If it weren't for performers' and theatre-makers' endless fascination with the Bard and their impulses to revisit, reinterpret, and reinvent his plays, Shakespeare would live only in books. Theatre is Shakespeare's home. We're not mucking about. We're the reason people still know his name.
